Burned at the Hot Corner

PITTSBURGH —  Steve Buechele is a good old boy with a passion for country music. His buddies call him “Boo.” On a drizzly Thursday night beside three Pennsylvania rivers, while his world did not exactly come undone, Boo did go home as blue as a country tune, having left the largest audience in the history of Pittsburgh baseball with his nickname on their lips.

At a National League playoff game in which only one run was scored, Buechele, the sure-handed third baseman of the Pirates, neglected to knock down a bouncing ball that wound up winning the game for the Atlanta Braves. Later, with a made-to-order opportunity to redeem himself by tying the score, Boo instead dubbed one onto the artificial turf that never got past the pitcher.

And that is the way the ball bounces.

“If it just took a reasonable bounce,” Buechele said afterward of the carpet two-bagger by Mark Lemke that leapfrogged over his shoulder, scoring David Justice from second base to win Game 2 of the league championship series for Atlanta, 1-0. “Not a perfect bounce, but a reasonable bounce. . . . “

Ninety-nine times out of 100, Boo makes the play. The very reason the Pirates brought him here was the skillful way Buechele handled himself around baseball’s hottest corner, which in turn enabled Bobby Bonilla to retreat to the relative comfort of right field. Even the unnerving adjustment of moving from the green grass of Texas to the lime sponge of Pittsburgh did not distract Buechele, who made only seven errors this season.

This, however, was not his night.

Back in his younger days, Buechele played some basketball at Servite High in Anaheim and then roomed with John Elway in an athletic dorm at Stanford. It was just a couple of weeks ago that Boo blew out 30 candles on his birthday cake, but since being traded from a nothing-special Texas club to a Pittsburgh team with the best record in baseball, he has felt like a kid again.

One crazy play was enough to age him a couple of years.

With two out in the Atlanta sixth, Justice on second and 57,533 eyewitnesses wondering which pitcher, Steve Avery or Zane Smith, would surrender a run first, Lemke sent one of Smith’s pitches bounding like a kangaroo toward the third-base line. Buechele took a look at Justice breaking for third, then played the ball--or, rather, let the ball play him.

Expecting it to spring chest-high, Buechele planned to race Justice to the bag and apply the tag.

“I didn’t think I had a play at first, because of the way Lemke got out of the box,” Buechele said. “Anyway, if I get a nice, normal little hop, we’re out of the inning.”

There was nothing normal about the way the baseball took off. Atlanta’s stadium is the one some call the Launching Pad, but should by any chance this league championship series not return here next week, Buechele will spend the winter wondering what launched Lemke’s double the way it did.

A clumsier third baseman, a Bonilla, might actually have saved the game by blocking the ball with his chest. Only a superior infielder, one with the instincts of Buechele, would have expected to stab such a difficult chance and then make a play on the runner barreling in from second.

Justice, who was nearly sent reeling from making contact with the third baseman, said of Buechele: “It was an aggressive play on his part. In the playoffs, you’re trying extra hard to be aggressive. He wasn’t thinking: ‘Knock the ball down.’ He was thinking: ‘Grab it, get the guy before he gets to the bag.’ ”

As things turned out, another of the reasons Pittsburgh lost the game was that one of Atlanta’s infielders, Lemke, did precisely what Buechele failed to do--prevent a ball from leaking into the outfield. With a belly-flop behind second base in the eighth inning, Lemke flagged down a single that stranded the game-tying run at third base.

In the ninth inning, with Bonilla on third and one out, Buechele stepped up with a shot at redemption. All Boo needed do was knock the ball somewhere into the outfield, but Pittsburgh’s batters had been failing to do that very thing all night. Only four balls got beyond the Braves’ infield all night.

Buechele tapped one 60 feet, 6 inches, right back to the pitcher, worst spot in the world. On one hop, the ball bounced right into Alejandro Pena’s glove.

“Why couldn’t one more bounce crazy?” Buechele asked.

Good name for a sad song.